British Ski & Snowboard website launch

This week we’re proud to announce the launch of the new British Ski & Snowboard (Team BSS) website, built and designed by Dusted. This project had special relevance for me since it combines my two great passions: snowboarding and digital.

As the national governing body for snowsports in the UK, BSS both manage the elite British snowsports teams and develop prospective winter olympic medalists. They came to us hoping to better utilise their technological and social media potential with an enjoyable user experience.

BSS have a huge number of athletes, many of whom have achievements worth sharing on the BSS website. However, the previous website was not optimised for this kind of interaction or sharing and it was our job to change that.

The first step was to develop an interactive and appealing new website design, suggesting a modern organisation that can relate to a younger audience. Previously, close to 40% of the BSS traffic was coming from mobile devices, with a discouraging bounce rate. We decided being readily accessible on mobile phones should help with this bounce rate, and encourage users to access the website more often.

Another area we saw potential in was the athletes’ profiles and news updates. Many young potential athletes come to BSS looking for inspiration or a glance at the lifestyle, and those areas are a great place to attract them. With the previous website, both visitors and authors of the content found the layout discouraging, and wouldn’t share on social media. The new design will help expand the reach of BSS and encourage engagement between athlete, the snowsport community and the wider public.

Essentially, what a lot of people want to see when they get to the site for BSS is videos or pictures of snowboarding and skiing. BSS have a lot of assets they’re eager to share and the old website wasn’t up to hosting media such as videos. A lot of the imagery wasn’t being shown off properly either, but now hopefully BSS can take advantage of media uploading because we’ve made it easy for them throughout the site.

Dave Edwards, Chief Executive of BSS, agrees and was polite enough to say in his press release,

“The new design looks slick and the new functionality of the website means it can be used at home or on the go on mobile devices. Probably the most important thing about the website is that we can showcase more videos and photographs, showing off our hugely popular sport.”

Our own Darren Holburn was quoted in said press release too;

“We are very proud indeed to be British Ski and Snowboard’s long-term strategic digital partner. Off the back of our sports branding experience we have delivered a new identity and website, and will continue to work on the ongoing digital strategy to drive support, partnerships and ultimately play a part in athlete success.”